At BlizzCon this year we had the chance to sit down with Blizzard's Senior Art Director Samwise Didier, who currently heads up the art team working on Heroes of the Storm. For those that are familiar with the name, you might know Samwise as one the key artists at Blizzard who shaped the look and feel of its many franchises since its days as a developer of Super Nintendo games. And then when his work on Warcraft III would go on to shape the look and feel of an entirely new genre, the MOBA, just about everyone would become familiar with that 'Blizzard-look'.

Heroes of the Storm, the developer's take on the MOBA genre, not only continues this work but also serves as a single game that celebrates each of the company's franchise. You could even call it BlizzCon: The Game, where heroes from Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch battle it out in bright and colourful arenas.

Naturally, wrangling all the different heroes from properties like Diablo, Warcraft, Overwatch, and making them play nice together is no easy feat. And heading up the task of making sure that each hero looks like they belong in the same game is Blizzard’s Senior Art Director, Samwise Didier. A name that is no doubt familiar to many Blizzard fans, Samwise joined the company in 1991, responding to an ad in a local paper looking for artists to create art for videogames. At the time, he was working as the head usher at a local movie theatre, and without any professional experience or a portfolio he simply took art that was hanging on his wall at home, and made the trek to the small development studio that was then known as Silicon & Synapse – later renamed, Blizzard Entertainment.

The first game that he would work on for the still relatively small developer was a game called Lost Vikings for the Super Nintendo. “Back when we first started it was twenty little Lost Vikings as it was based on Lemmings, an old PC game from the time,” Samwise tells me. “And over the course of the development, which was probably a few months, it went from 20 to 10 to 5 to 3 Vikings.” Fast forward over twenty years, and Blizzard announce the latest hero added to the Heroes of the Storm line-up, the very same Lost Vikings from the Super Nintendo. “I can’t tell you how cool it was when we introduced Lost Vikings as our newest Hero. Here was Heroes of the Storm, our newest game, featuring the oldest characters that I worked on.” Samwise recalls, “It was cool to see that these little Viking guys could manage to make their way from 1991 all the way to today. The oldest art that I worked on was now becoming the newest art that I was working on.”

From Warcraft III to Heroes of the Storm - Talking Art and Blizzard's Long History with Samwise Didier